I leave long-legged Miss Pinon, our quarter horse, with the farrier for fifteen minutes to get the kids sent off on their play date with the mom who's been kind enough to drive all the way out here to take them to the movies in Santa Fe with her son. They are rural people too. We all share the driving to give the kids some summer social life.

When I return, Pinon is bleeding from her mouth, her delicate head raised in alarm, white rimmed eyes settling on me from their frantic searching. The farrier points to her cut lower lip. She snorts, and I see the blood on her teeth. She now has on an old rope halter, which is stained red, and his assistant is holding her by the short end of a broken lead rope, the other half is hanging from the fence post, telling the whole story.

I take her by the halter, and her alarm level decreases by 75%.

She sat back on the rope, I hear him saying through the anger pounding in my ears. I'm trying to stop it so I can get this poor mare settled down. I let her do it so she'd learn a lesson. Then she plunged into the fence post. She's kind of short on brains, isn't she? He's wielding one of the farrier tools in his hand.

Pecos born and bred, I hear the assistant muttering. Is she wild or what? he is questioning me dumbly, with all the blank-eyed stupidity of a brute.

A simple brute with thick hands and a thicker sensibility.

Pinon takes after the name my little boy gave her. In some ways she is a hard brown nut. There's a hard round encapsulated place inside of the mare and if it gets touched, it will explode. But you can feel it when it begins to happen inside of the horse. At least some of us can. Those of us who are not cowboying neanderthals. And the solution is simple--breathe deeply, then exhale, repeat, and the miracle is that you feel what has begun to spiral up in the mare like a funnel cloud just as suddenly de-escalate. Good air in. Demons out. The bad stuff comes out on the exhale. I don't know why it works. But it does. Before the horse ever gets where she's apparently just been provoked by these dimwitted ogres.

There's never never blood. Never any hurting. Not at my place.

I don't know if the horse is Pecos born and bred. It doesn't matter where she came from. With everything she knows--her surprising repertoire of easy gaits, her boundless energy and athleticism, her generosity under saddle, the ability to almost canter in place in moments of breathtaking collection, her trail smarts, power steering, her loving and devoted attitude that flourishes under the smallest amoun of kindness--I suspect the horse started out in a good place. Someone else loved this mare once too, and then she fell upon hard times like a lot of them do. The tell-tale scar running across one knee is somehow a part of Pinon's story.

Sometimes a hard brown nut gets thrown into the machinery, seizing the engine up.

I am tempted to run the brutes off on the spot. Or sick heeler dog Lila Jane on them. Yeah, that'd show them. But I let them finish. And after they drive off, I promise the mare, never again.

I will never leave you.